The GENES Blog (GEnealogy News and EventS): Top stories concerning ancestral research in Britain, Ireland, and their diasporas, from Irish born Scottish based professional family historian, author and tutor Chris Paton. Feel free to quote from this blog, but please credit The GENES Blog if you do so. To contact me please email chrismpaton @ outlook.com.

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Friday, 14 October 2011

Burns Monument Centre offers ScotlandsPeople

The Kilmarnock based Burns Monument Centre (www.burnsmonumentcentre.co.uk) is now offering unrestricted access to the ScotlandsPeople databases for £15 a day, and will also be providing access to digitised kirk session records from November 10th.

I attended the centre before its official opening a couple of years back and at that point it was hoped that there would be access to the same computer system that is available at the ScotlandsPeople Centre. In fact, the agreement now in force will be for access to the external website i.e. www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk - this means that you will have access to the Roman Catholic records also (I think I'm right in saying they are not yet available at the centre), but at the same time there will be online closure periods - 100 years for births, 75 for marriages and £50 for deaths - which is not the case in Edinburgh.

The kirk session records that have been digitised for Scotland up to 1901, and which have already been made available at several archives in Scotland, will be available at the Burns Monument Centre from November 10th, following a launch event on the 9th. The event is free, but ticket only - though I believe it is now fully booked.